Simple Domains: Vassals and Tributaries

I've been playing Crusader Kings 2 again lately, and the split between feudal vassals who give you troops and city vassals who give you money is interesting.  It has me thinking about my Estates ideas from back when.

Maybe a good option for Simple Domains would be to classify vassal and tributary domains a little differently.

A vassal domain is one whose ruler has entered into a feudal contract with another domain.  The vassal domain's primary obligation is troops - rather than paying taxes in cash, it pays them (all or mostly) by maintaining and supplying troops and putting them at the disposal of its sovereign.  Taking a quick look over Simple Borderlands domains, it looks like if you roll your taxes into garrison you end up with about twice the standing troops you otherwise would, so I don't think this is wildly unreasonable - it's not like we're taking domains with 5kgp/mo in garrison and asking them to assemble 50kgp/mo standing armies for their lords to call up.

Maybe this is a good spot to use per-culture mercenary mixes; when you call your vassals up, they don't bring super-specialist armies, just the troops of their peoples' way of war.

Henchman domains are typically vassals, because they're loyal enough to trust with troops.  When you call up vassal troops, roll loyalty of the vassal; if you roll badly they make excuses and send only a fraction of their obligated troops.

Tributary domains, on the other hand, pay all of their obligations to their sovereign in cash.  You don't need to trust them with a double-size standing army, but if you want to turn their taxes into mercenaries, it will take you time.

Perhaps the arrangement between sub-domains and their sovereign has some influence on morale, depending on the nature of the underlying domain.  A hill tribe that you've subjugated may be happy to provide warriors, but they're cash-poor.  A trading city has plenty of cash but no access to good troops; asking them to maintain an army for you is a greater burden, and will reduce their domain morale.

Vassal domains providing troops instead of taxes seems like it might be a good way to accelerate the domain game, where the ability to accumulate an army is the limiting factor of an up-and-coming fighter.

Probabilistic Mercenary Advancement

I like the idea of mercenaries going from 0th to 1st level through extended campaigning, but I don't like needing to have a spreadsheet of every mercenary unit's XP.  It occurred to me last night that maybe a low-fidelity approach would work.  At the end of a session where a mercenary unit earned XP from an adventure or campaign, compare that XP to the XP needed to level (for a 6-man squad of baseline 0th level infantrymen, a total of 600XP under ACKS).  If the XP earned is greater than the total required, great, the unit levels.  If not, convert it into a fraction of the XP required to level, then turn that into a probability and then into a die roll.  So if the unit earned 300 XP, that's a 50% chance to become veterans, or 4+ on a d6.  If the roll is failed, the XP is lost.

This works out about the same in expectation, but with a long tail; some units will level sooner, some later, some will get very unlucky and take forever to level.  But that is rare.  It does have the nice property that all units of the same type that got the same share during a single adventure will have the same probability of leveling, so you can just roll a big handful of d6s and count your successes.

You could probably also do something with casualties from veteran units giving a chance of loss of veteran status, as new recruits replace the old skilled ones, although as Von Schell notes in Battle Leadership, even a few veterans mixed into a green unit help a great deal in bringing it back up to veteran status.  So maybe taking a bunch of casualties and replacing them makes a veteran unit fight as a regular unit for one adventure or so, rather than risking permanent reversion.  Maybe if there are a bunch of casualties during that second adventure too, then it becomes a risk (but here we are again back at adding book-keeping, state, and memory across adventures).

Another potentially entertaining and even more ill-advised extension would be to have henchmen or even PCs level probabilistically, with the same procedure of "compare earned XP from this adventure to XP to next level, convert to fraction, convert that to a probability, and roll".  But PCs already have a bunch of state associated with them, so tracking one more (XP) is not a great burden.  It could be pretty funny for henchmen to level nondeterministically though; it would make "henchmen of equal or greater level than master" a more common occurrence.

Crunching the Numbers on Base-Building in ACKS: Workshops

I've talked before about doing more "base-building" style gameplay in the mid-levels.  I think that ACKS already has pretty much all the numbers that you'd need to do this; there might be a little extrapolation but I think most of the work is just putting it all together.  Much as the domain rules are very general and bore concretization into simple domains.

Players will probably want workshops or blacksmiths or something like that in their hall/compound, and the numbers are easy so let's start there.  A master craftsman plus two journeymen and four apprentices produce a total of 130gp/mo, with total wages of 100gp/mo.  If you paid them up front at the 30-to-one typical ratio, that's 3kgp in wages to hire them indefinitely.  They also need a stone building, call it equivalent to a townhouse at 1200gp, and a Craftsman's Workshop worth of tools per Domains at War: Campaigns, for 350gp (although we're only using 7/8 of it, so maybe call it 300gp in the interest of round numbers).  So that gives us a grand total of 4500gp up-front cost for 130gp/mo of production.  Neither of these numbers are especially convenient.  If we wanted nice round numbers, we could probably go up to 5000gp up front for 150gp/mo of production in a 30x30 footprint.

And we can use that for pretty much any skilled craftsman producing small-scale goods (ie, not ships or siege weapons or other big construction projects that use a lot of unskilled labor, and not things that need lots of land like healing herb gardens or breeding horses).  Blacksmith?  Obviously.  Armorer?  Sure.  Brewery?  No problem.  Military oil refinery?  Why not (150gp/mo of military oil is kind of a lot; 75 flasks a month is more than I've ever seen a party go through.  But maybe they would if they had it!).  Gunpowder grinder?  What could go wrong?

I like that 5kgp is totally within the reach of early-wilderness-level adventurers.  This is a solution for the problem of "we have money but we can't buy the things we want in this market because it's too small".  5kgp for 150/mo is also comparable to the return on agricultural investments (but since it's in concrete goods, it's much less flexible); it will be more profitable in areas with low land value or high garrison costs, but worse in areas with good land value and low garrison costs.  So that's sort of interesting.  If you wanted to get real detailed with it, you could also have each workshop add ~3 urban families to the domain it's built in (a master craftsman is eminently marriageable and likely to start a family when he arrives, while the journeymen and apprentices aren't but there are a bunch of them).

And then the limiting factor on building workshops is mostly finding master craftsmen and inducing them into your service.  I think making them available as Alchemists or Chirurgeons is correct, since those both also have 3 levels of a General proficiency.

We may also want some chance of disaster, like from the Investment rules in Axioms.  I expect players might accumulate a lot of workshops and other comparable facilities, so I don't really want a per-facility roll.  I would probably need to think more about what the right way to do this is, or if we want it at all.

ACKS Mercenary Mixes: Dwarves

Context: Previously, I experimented with reducing the types of mercenaries available in each market, while preserving the total wages of mercenaries in that market, in order to make assembling whole units faster and reduce complexity in play.  Today, an application.

 

It always bugged me in ACKS that you could hire dwarven mercenaries (and you should, because they're good), and you can build a dwarven domain, but if you wanted to hire mercenaries in your dwarven domain, they were mostly human.  A reasonable judge would surely fix this, but it would probably be ad hoc.  But now, thanks to the wonders of hacky python, we have answers.

Let's take a ratio of 4 heavy infantry to 2 crossbowdwarves to 1 mounted crossbowdwarf to 1 fury.  It might be fun to do two dwarven mercenary mixes, one civilized, with crossbows and maybe musketeers, and one uncivilized, with furies and...  I dunno, maybe slingers or javelineers?  Disrupt enemy formations before the furies crash into them?  But let's just start with this, under the assumption that furies are uncommon in dwarven society but not that uncommon.

Raw counts
Type	I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Heavy infantry	286.9	79.23	41.03	12.62	6.1	2.18
Crossbowmen	143.45	39.62	20.52	6.31	3.05	1.09
Mounted crossbowmen	71.72	19.81	10.26	3.16	1.52	0.54
Furies	71.72	19.81	10.26	3.16	1.52	0.54
Squad
Type	I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Heavy infantry	47 per month	13 per month	6 per month	2 per month	1 per month	3 months
Crossbowmen	23 per month	6 per month	3 per month	1 per month	2 months	6 months
Mounted crossbowmen	23 per month	6 per month	3 per month	1 per month	2 months	6 months
Furies	11 per month	3 per month	1 per month	2 months	4 months	12 months
Platoon
Type	I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Heavy infantry	9 per month	2 per month	1 per month	3 months	5 months	14 months
Crossbowmen	4 per month	1 per month	2 months	5 months	10 months	28 months
Mounted crossbowmen	4 per month	1 per month	2 months	5 months	10 months	28 months
Furies	2 per month	2 months	3 months	10 months	20 months	56 months
Company
Type	I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Heavy infantry	2 per month	2 months	3 months	10 months	20 months	56 months
Crossbowmen	1 per month	4 months	6 months	20 months	40 months	111 months
Mounted crossbowmen	1 per month	4 months	6 months	20 months	40 months	111 months
Furies	2 months	7 months	12 months	39 months	79 months	221 months

Bam.

This led me to realize that I didn't compute rounded total monthly costs of operation for dwarf units in Simplified Mercenaries (nor elf units, for that matter).

Type	Company kgp/mo	Company	Platoon	Squad
Dwarven Heavy Infantry	2.5	2500	625	125
Dwarven Crossbowmen	3.25	3250	825	175
Dwarven Mounted Crossbowmen	3.75	3750	950	200
Dwarven Furies	2.25	2250	575	125

Man, this was an easy post.  I wish I had more trustworthy tooling to compute BRs though - I had an error in computing monomerc cavalry BR because there was a cell in my spreadsheet that I forgot to change, and it has me wondering if the same error has occurred with any of my previous cavalry, particularly the nomads.  Maybe I'll script that up next.  More ambitious would be to build a pipeline going from ACKS stats to some intermediate representation of Battles stats, BR, and wages which can be rendered several ways for human consumption for different purposes, or referenced by market mixer ratio files...

I guess elves would also be a natural next thing to do with my current technology.

Thought ACKSperiments: The Monomerc

(With apologies to Joseph Campbell)

 

An approach to solving the problem of complexity in mercenary hiring and management in the same style as Simpler Logistics (but actually simple this time).

One of the central reasons that dealing with mercenaries is a pain in the ass is because there are so many types.  My previous proposal for dealing with this was to hire mercenaries as units, so that at least you get a whole unit of a single type, which you can then deploy in Domains at War.  But there's an even simpler approach: reduce the number of types.  I've already done a little of this, rolling crossbowmen in with bowmen for example, but how far could you go?

What if, as with mounts vs pack animals in Simpler Logistics, you only had one or maybe two types of mercenaries?  If those troops were equipped and trained correctly, you could choose what formation / fighting style (formed vs loose) to deploy them in.  And then "Number of Mercenaries" becomes a single piece of party state during wilderness adventures, like "Number of Mounts" (or an entry on each PC's character sheet - he has this many mercenaries, and in mass combat is the leader of a division formed of them, with his henchmen as lieutenants).

There is some design space around changing formations - maybe getting them to actually fight in formation instead of as irregular requires some effort.  Explorers, thieves, and bladedancers can get mercenaries under their command to fight in Loose formations; clerics and dwarves can get mercenaries under their command to fight in Formed formations; elves and fighters can do both.  Troops under the command of wizards, priestesses, and other Fighting 0 classes fight as Irregular.  A unit with a lieutenant will fight in a formation that fits that lieutenant's class (so your dwarf division commander with an explorer henchman can get one unit of loose in his otherwise formed division).

I've played with a couple of drafts of this.  Generally I end up equipping them with ring or chainmail, a spear, a short sword, a shield, and some ranged weapon.  This gives them 90' speed, and then depending on whether they're using the spear or the sword+ranged, they can be either Formed or Loose.  The trouble that I end up running into is that the BR for Loose units with any significant ranged capability ends up higher, and consequently their nominal wages.

There's a sweet spot with javelins as the ranged weapon where the BR for Loose and Formed troops is equal, but players will probably (reasonably) complain.  This does avoid making out every mercenary to be a competent horse-archer though, which is nice, and if you're using the Campaigns rules for recruiting and training troops, you don't need to them to qualify as archers.  Maybe cutting it down to two unit types (Mercenary Archers vs Mercenary Spearmen and then you can mount either) or four unit types (heavy infantry, bowmen, heavy cavalry, light cavalry) is as far as you can reasonably minimize.  Going down to four unit types also means that the light cavalry isn't necessarily also archers, which solves the "all horse archers all the time" potential issue.

In any case, an attempt:

 

Mercenaries are equipped with chain mail, a spear, a shield, a short sword, and three javelins.  Their speed is 90', provided that they are not carrying their own rations.

Formed mercenary infantry: 2/3/4 FF, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 6, ML +0, 2 spear and shield 10+ or 2 javelin 10+, BR 2 (12gp/mo)

 

Loose and irregular mercenary infantry: 2/3/4 LF, AC5, HD 1, UHP 6, ML -1, 2 sword and shield 10+ or 2 javelin 10+, BR 2 as LF (12gp/mo) or 1 as IF (6gp/mo)

Formed mercenary cavalry (on medium warhorse with leather barding): 3/6/9 FM, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 6, ML +1, 2 spear and shield 10+ (+1 damage on charge), charge 3 hooves 8+, or 2 javelin 10+, BR 4.5 as FM (54gp/mo) or 2 as IM with +0 ML (24gp/mo)

 

Loose mercenary cavalry: 3/6/9 LM, AC 5, HD 1, UHP 6, ML +1, 2 sword and shield 10+, or 2 javelin 10+, BR 4.5 (54gp/mo)

 

Since a medium warhorse, saddle, and barding cost 315 gp, and there was that post on the forums forever ago about how every ~10gp of equipment raises the mercenary's wages by about 1gp/mo, we can conclude that you do in fact need to pay extra to get cavalry-capable mercenaries (unless you're willing to have them fight as Irregular Mounted, which...  is kind of reasonable, for Not Real Cavalry).  So having just a single type of mercenary seems to not work out.

Anyway, if you take these 12gp/mo mercenaries, total the available gp value of mercenaries in each market class every month, divide by 12, and get your number of Mercenaries available per month.  I thought I had a spreadsheet for this from when I was doing Simple Mercenaries the first time but it turned out what I actually had was a python script, so I hacked that up a bit and the results were really interesting.  Total expected value for mercenary wages available per month is way higher than I thought in small markets - it's just that about half of that is in low-probability high-wage cavalry.

Anyway, assuming you consider "total expected wages of mercenaries available per month divided by single-type wage" as an acceptable calculation, the number of universal mercenaries available at 12gp/mo looks something like this:

Market class	I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Total merc wage	12910	3566	1846	568	274	98
Mercenaries	1076	297	154	47	23	8

That's enough to build out companies from class IV markets in reasonable timeframes!

On further reflection, it might be interesting to capture variance in addition to expected value on total wage, or otherwise understand the distribution better, especially for small markets where it's possible to roll no cavalry at all in a particular month.  That sounds like a lot more work and statistics though.

I think this single-mercenary-type approach is a bust due to cavalry and archer problems, but I'm happy to have rediscovered my tech for computing total expected mercenary wages per month by market class.  I think combining this with a much narrower set of mercenary types (probably 2-4 by culture) should hit a nice middle ground between ACKS' default of "there are too many types of mercenaries so building units is very slow" and the single-mercenary-type approach which makes building units stupid-easy, but makes a lot of compromises in gear selection and bends the rules for cavalry qualification.

ACKS: Simple(r) Logistics

Things I'm aiming for here:

• Leave the party with meaningful choices in terms of expedition composition and gear selection, but reduce the granularity significantly
• Support doing most wilderness resource book-keeping once per week; if the day is analogous to the turn in the dungeon, then the weekly rest day is analogous to the one-in-six rest turn, and this is also when you do resource updates like torches.

Here's a spreadsheet which handles most of this (doesn't do carts, doesn't warn you when you bring empty barrels that will weigh too much to carry when full, and the range estimation doesn't take into account ration weigh decreasing over time - and doesn't support the shield-bearer's Leader of Mules ability!).  But I do think this gets it down to the point where you could throw together a mule-train at the table in a couple minutes at the beginning of the session, in the spirit of No Homework, and then update the spreadsheet as the party uses gear, eats rations, suffers casualties, etc.

State

A party's logistical state can be expressed in the following terms:

• Number of mounts
• Number of pack animals
• Number of carts
• Barrels (empty and full)
• Stone of each of the following:
• Fresh rations
• Iron rations
• Dungeoneering equipment
• Camping equipment
• Medicine
• Trade goods and treasure

Mounts

Much as with mercenaries, managing a herd of small numbers of various types of horses is a pain in the ass.  Pick one type of mount and convert the gp value of all riding mounts for each market class into a single type.  Here I use Medium Riding Horses as a nice middle ground.  Depending on setting, other types of horse, camels, elephants, or big guars might also make sense.  Characters who want to do mounted combat are responsible for their own warhorses, as are cavalry mercenaries.

Mounts come with riding saddles and saddlebags (medium riding horse with riding saddle and three saddlebags costs 65gp).

Mount availability by market class (pooling light riding horses, camels, and medium riding horses):

Class VI: 50%

Class V: 1

Class IV: 5

Class III: 10

Class II: 25

Class I: 80

If you have as many mounts as characters (PCs, henchmen, hirelings, mercenaries, guides, prisoners, ...), the expedition can move at up to the speed of the mounts.  If you don't, then you're stuck at the speed of whoever's walking, but at least you can still use the mounts for scouting, pursuit of routing enemies, etc.  If you have more mounts than party members, the extra mounts can be used as remounts, allowing you to travel even further and faster than normal - with twice as many mounts as party members, you travel at twice the mounts' speed, with three times as many, at 2.5x speed, and with four times as many, at thrice the mounts' speed.

Mounts can carry some amount of load in addition to their riders; subtract 20 stone for the rider, saddle, and personal effects from the mount's normal load, and subtract the mounts' remaining carrying capacity from the weight carried before applying weight to pack animals.  Mounts with riding saddles can't be used to carry any single object of greater than 3 stone encumbrance, as it won't fit in a saddlebag.  In the interest of simplicity, neglect the fact that you can encumber your mounts over their normal load; riding saddles probably aren't really built for it.  If you have more mounts than party members, each extra mount still only provides carrying capacity of its normal load minus 20 stone, since you need to keep them fresh for rotating.

Per The Prairie Traveler (free on gutenberg), mounts don't tend to just drop dead from normal use.  The things that kill mounts are lack of forage or water, long forced marches which prevent them from grazing at night, and being used in pursuit of game while hunting.

• If a party makes a forced march and doesn't take a rest day in an area with fodder, 10% of mounts "fall away" - die, are lamed, or become too sick to keep up.
• If mounts have no or very poor forage for a full week, 25% of mounts fall away.
• If mounts have no water for three days, 50% fall away (or to simplify, no water for a week, 75% fall away).

When mounts fall away, a character with Animal Husbandry may make a check per mount to prevent it (18+ for Husbandry 1, 14+ for Husbandry 2, 10+ for Husbandry 3), up to 3 "patients" plus 1 per rank of proficiency.

(These numbers are probably too severe for camels; consider 5% for forced march without rest, 10% for lack of food, 25% for lack of water for a week; yes wild camels can go 6-7 months without drinking in winter, but that's not when being used as workbeasts)

Mounts can be butchered for food.  A healthy mount yields 30 stone of meat (fresh rations), per statistics on modern Mongolia's horse-meat industry; a mount which has fallen away yields only 10 stone.  Butchering animals generates an extra wilderness random encounter roll. 

Pack Animals

As with mounts - pick one type of pack animal, sum the value of pack and draft animals of all types in each market class, and convert it into that type.  The noble mule is the obvious choice for adventurers, as they can also be brought into dungeons.

Pack animals come with draft/pack saddles (mule plus pack saddle costs 25gp).

Pack animal availability by market class (pooling the value of available oxen, donkeys, draft horses, and mules):

Class VI: 1

Class V: 2

Class IV: 8

Class III: 20

Class II: 45

Class I: 140

When you have totaled the weight of the party's equipment, divide it by the carrying capacity of the pack animal and use that to determine another limit on the party's speed.

Pack animals suffer the same attrition rates from the same sources as mounts, and may be preserved through Animal Husbandry in the same way (though they count against the same pool of "patients").

Pack animals can be butchered, like mounts, but yield only 25 stone of meat each (for healthy mules) and 8 stone each for unhealthy mules.

Pack animals cannot carry single objects of greater than their normal load (so for example a mule could carry two 20-stone water barrels, one on each side of its pack saddle, but placing a 25-stone golden statue right over its spine is not a great idea).  To carry single heavy objects, you need...

Carts

For each single object weighing between your pack animal's normal and max load, a single pack animal can pull a cart carrying it at a quarter of the animal's normal speed, or two pack animals can pull the cart at half speed.  A cart carrying a single object between your pack animal's max load and twice its max load can be pulled by two pack animals at quarter speed.  Carts cannot traverse mountains, swamps, deserts, or forests without a road.  A cart costs 25gp.

If you need to transport even bigger single items, large and enormous carts pulled by teams of 2-8 animals can be fabricated.

Carts:

• Small
• Cost: 25gp
• With one pack animal, carry an object up to the animal's max load at quarter speed
• With two pack animals, carry an object up to max load at half speed
• With two pack animals, carry an object up to twice max load at quarter speed
• Large
• Cost: 50gp
• With two pack animals, carry an object up to twice max load at quarter speed
• With four pack animals, carry an object up to twice max load at half speed
• With four pack animals, carry an object up to four times max load at quarter speed
• Enormous
• Cost: 100gp
• With four pack animals, carry an object up to four times max load at quarter speed
• With eight pack animals, carry an object up to four times max load at half speed
• With eight pack animals, carry an object up to eight times max load at quarter speed

This is more complicated than I had hoped and needs more work, but I'm not sure which options to prune here.  Enormous carts probably don't come up much in practice (how are you going to get a one-ton object into the cart in the first place?).

Barrels

If you're not planning to go to places where you need to bring your own water, you don't need to worry about barrels.  An empty barrel weighs 5 stone.  A full barrel weighs 20 stone and contains two man-weeks of water (or two animal-days).

(These are actually fairly small barrels - the barrels used for aging wine weigh ~100 lbs empty and hold 60 gallons, or 10 stone empty, 58 stone full, ~8.5 man-weeks of water.  This gets you more man-weeks of water per stone / lower barrel-overhead, but they are large enough that you need carts).

You probably want to carry empty barrels into the wilderness, fill them up, cross a dry stretch and drink them back to empty, rather than carrying them full all the time.

Rations

A man-week of rations weighs one stone.  Iron rations cost 3gp/stone, while fresh rations cost 1gp/stone.  At the end of each week, half of uneaten fresh rations spoil, while 10% of uneaten iron rations spoil.

Animals eat their own normal load in grain or hay per week (per Keegan's History of Warfare).  Carrying your own fodder in for extended mounted operations in areas without grass is generally ill-advised (although I guess you could do something like asparagus staging, if you replace "rocket engine" with "pack mule", "fuel" with "grain", and "jettison" with "slaughter" - still, you will need to slaughter a substantial fraction of your mules every week).

(ACKS Logistics: It Isn't Necessarily Rocket Science)

Dungeoneering Equipment

Most of the stuff found in the "Adventuring Equipment" table - iron spikes, 10' poles, rope and chain, military oil, etc.  1 stone of dungoneering equipment costs 10gp.  When entering a dungeon, select the equipment that your characters will carry in and deduct its weight from the number of stone of dungeoneering equipment brought into the wilderness.  If players get cheeky and try to convert it all into locks and lanterns (which are worth more than 10gp / stone), have them start deducting gp value from the brought equipment as well as mass.

Camping Equipment

Tents, bedrolls, pots and pans, flint and steel, sewing kits, extra socks, that sort of stuff.  1 stone of camping equipment costs 3gp.  A party with less than two stone of camping equipment per character (PC, henchman, hirelings, mercenary, guide, ...) suffers morale penalties and possibly other ill effects of sleeping in the rain without a tent, like increased disease risk, inability to heal naturally, inability to prepare spells, etc.  Harsher environments may demand more than two stone per character.

Something to consider: should camping equipment degrade over time, at a slower rate than rations, serving as a resource that can't be replenished in the wilderness?

Medicine

Medicinal herbs and equipment for applying them.  Costs 60gp per stone.  Like dungeoneering equipment, must be converted from abstract stone into concrete herbs before entering a dungeon.  May be found while foraging.

Trade Goods and Treasure

Everything else with mass that the party might want to carry into the wilderness somewhere other than on their backs.

Closing Thoughts

I think the main tension in this system comes from the difference in speed between mounts and pack animals.  You want to go fast.  You also want to have plenty of rations and medicine and dungeoneering gear.  You really can't have both.

Heavy Mule

The way my players traditionally played, probably because they had lots of fighters with "normal animals are afraid of you" resurrection results: lots of infantry mercenaries and pack animals, maybe one or two characters mounted on warhorses.  Inexpensive, plenty of carrying capacity, can carry fairly large single objects like water barrels, heavy treasure, and small siege weapons, but dog-slow.  If you're bringing heavy infantry or PCs in plate on foot and the terrain permits it, carts aren't even much of a penalty.

Full Mounty

Mounts only, no pack animals.  Expensive, lowish carrying capacity, can't carry large single objects, and doesn't work with infantry mercenaries, but fast fast fast.  Endurance is limited by carrying capacity; probably works best if you have strong Survival and can reliably acquire plenty of fresh rations in the field.  This is sort of the wilderness equivalent of this idea for lightweight play in the dungeon that my players had once.

Heavy Cav, Light Foot

Bring a small number of mounts and as many mules as you please.  Mount characters with 60' speed first, then characters with 90' speed if enough mounts are available.  Have characters with 120' speed walk.  This is the 80/20 solution - mounting the slowest 20% of the party can increase your speed by 50-100%.  Moderately easy supply situation - can handle lots of mules, but doesn't do well with carts.  Probably a good approach at low wilderness levels when you don't have the money / market class for many mounts and the only mercenaries you can get in a useful quantity are light foot, slingers, and archers anyway.

Base Camp

Leave town with an big, slow pack train and a decent complement of foot mercenaries, but also enough mounts for the party proper and a small group of mounted mercs.  Find somewhere defensible to park your infantry and mules.  Split off the cavalry and mounted PCs and go search the wilderness for your objective, returning to pack train/camp to resupply as needed.  If you find your destination and it's defensible, maybe relocate the camp there.

Foot Only?

Something I'm still not sure about is whether pure foot without either pack animals or mounts is reasonable under any circumstance, if a niche for it exists at all.  Maybe drive the mules as far into the desert as they will go, slaughter them where they fall and bury the water barrels, and then you're pure foot from there, following your breadcrumb trail of mule skeletons back out and digging up your water caches as you go?  Sounds dicey.

A/X: Refactoring Mercenary Hiring

Way back in 2016, I wrote this post about hiring mercenaries as (small) units.  I still think that a focus on units from squad to company-scale is appropriate for wilderness play in ACKS - at the low end, a beastman warband can be modeled as about five gangs, each the equal of a squad of mercenaries.  In the middle, a village is ~5-6 warbands, each on average 30 strong, so a small platoon-scale battle or good-sized squad-scale battle.  On the high end, a village is about one or two companies, so a confederation of villages is a small company-scale battle or large platoon-scale battle.

A simplification of that hiring process struck me recently, though.  Tracking how long a particular unit has been in production is a lot of state, and rolling for each type of mercenary randomly each month will lead to swingy results, where sometimes there is a drought and sometimes there is an overabundance of mercenaries.  This is reasonable and realistic, but if one of my goals is to make preparing an expedition quicker, and if downtime spent hiring mercs is somewhat abstracted, then this approach is less than ideal.

We can preserve the expected value and distribution of available mercenaries by changing the order of operations.

Available mercenaries per month by market class:

VI: 20% chance of one platoon (or 1 squad)

V: 60% chance of one platoon (or 3 squads)

IV: 1 platoon, with 25% chance of a second platoon (or 6 squads)

III: 3 platoons, with 20% chance of a fourth platoon

II: 1 company, 2 platoons

I: 6 companies

Mercenary unit type (1d20):

1-4: Light infantry

5-10: Archers or crossbows

11-12: Heavy infantry

13: Longbows

14-16: Light cavalry

17: Horse archers

18: Heavy cavalry

19: Cataphract cavalry

20: Exotic (dwarves, elves, elephants, beastmen, or roll again if nothing springs to mind)

(This isn't perfect - it slightly underweights light infantry, light cavalry, and horse archers, and slightly overweights longbows and cataphracts.  But it's a reasonable starting point that avoids using d%s)

Independent of the roll for type, 25% of mercenary units are veterans.

Not sure about hiring search cost yet.  It probably isn't unreasonable to say that you're searching for all available mercenary types, so about 8 or 10 times the cost to search for a single type under the core rules.  The standard "half in the first week, a quarter in the second week, and the last quarter in the third week" schedule for finding units still applies if you're using it with high-fidelity timekeeping instead of "in some market in the nebulous time between open-table adventures" (in which case the gp cost becomes the more limiting factor).

I think this approach might have a couple of nice properties.

Using this to generate available mercenaries is almost certainly faster than the core system.  The number of rolls required, even in large markets, remains quite small, especially if you roll the d20 for type and the d4 for veterancy at the same time (if you have a couple of matched pairs of d20s and d4s, this parallelizes even better).  Since mercenaries are found and hired as units, the reaction roll to hire rule might actually be used rather than ignored.  Additionally, I like that there are no or almost no "dead rolls", where you're just rolling 0 mercs / unavailability of a type.

I think it would be easy to create culture-specific mercenary type tables; chaotic domains get their own table, dwarven settlements get their own table, desert settlements with camels and elephants, western european troop mix without cataphracts and horse archers, norse unit comp, etc.  This is somewhat dangerous though, because the average value of those troops might be higher or lower than baseline, and then the economy gets a little out of wack.  If you replace the 20th entry with an Exotic Mercenary Type subtable, and then customize that by culture, it could get even wilder.

I think this system would also help address one of the problems that we had in the early mid-levels in ACKS, where we would travel between settlements and pick up tiny piddling numbers of different types of mercenaries and not have enough of any one type to constitute a unit.  This system always gives you a unit.  It might not be a good unit, and it might not be the type that you wanted, but it moves the problem of assembling units up one layer (you might still need to build a platoon out of squads, but at least you don't have to build squads out of individuals), and combining squads into mixed platoons (of eg bows+longbows, light cav+horse archers, and heavy cav+cataphracts) or platoons into mixed companies may be easier when you're already starting with nice round unit numbers.  If certain combinations in certain ratios are expected to occur often, it would even be easy to have those mixed-unit stats on hand.

There is probably room here for also randomly generating mercenary officers attached to / in charge of each unit.  Might slow things down a lot though.

One weakness here is that this abstraction leaks - when it comes time for a hired mercenary unit to "heal" in town, replacing losses with fresh troops, the number of individual troops of a particular type matters.  So we can't jettison the old tables entirely (but we might be able to reframe them as "healing rate of unit by type and market class", and then take averages rather than ever having to roll).  But then you also don't want to have both healing and hiring in the same market in the same month.  So that gets kind of gnarly.

In retrospect, rolling slingers into archers instead of into light infantry may have been a mistake, as archers come out really heavy in this table.  But this is easy to correct here - changing light infantry to 1-6 and archers to 7-10 would get pretty close (or light infantry 1-4, slingers 5-6, archers 7-10, if I wanted to add slingers back).  Likewise, maybe I should've split medium cav half-and-half between light and heavy instead of all into light.  It's possible that there are other artifacts in total available troop numbers or the type distribution as a result of basing it on my previous work, which was already an approximation.  So this might benefit from going back to the core numbers and starting over with this approach in mnd.

I wonder if a similar approach would work for magic items; currently I have a script to roll the number available for each magic item, which results in scrolls being really quite common.

Simple Domains: XP Up Front

For most of 2019, I was wrestling with squaring the circle of open table vs campaign play.  One of the central issues is "stuff over time" - expenses over time, income over time, etc.  When you don't keep very strong, consistent track of time between adventures, this stuff gets annoying.  I had a partial solution to problems of this form using ACKS' magic time-discounting ratio for mercenaries, turning them from an expense-over-time into a one-time cost.

It hit me a while back that the same could be done for domain income and, perhaps more importantly, domain XP.  Take the monthly net income, multiply it by the time constant of 30, and there's your XP value for conquering this domain, just like a monster entry.  No domain XP threshold, but the exponential XP curve sort of makes it work out - taking a (civilized) barony might give you 60k XP, but if you're high level that's not going to do much for you (might be worth extending the exponential progression up over 8th, instead of switching to linear progression - big domains yield a lot of XP).  And if you lose it, you lose the XP.  Sometimes this big lump of XP will be enough for you to level multiple times.  We already have a mechanism for dealing with big lump sums though - "you can only level once per adventure".  The same would work fine here - you can get better training by ruling a domain, but you need to go out and apply it in order to turn it into levels.  Maybe allow mass combats to also count as adventures.  This makes inheritance by a low-level character work out pretty cleanly; it doesn't take them from 1st to 8th overnight, it's still a gradual process, but a much-accelerated one that should bring them back to parity with the party relatively quickly.  Inherited domains could almost serve as a replacement for reserve XP as a power-floor for replacement characters.

If the party as a whole takes a domain, I see two ways to handle it.  One is to split the rulership XP among them equally, and then as they get more domains and start assigning them to individual characters you stop dividing it.  Another is to make class-specific stores of domain XP.  So maybe your civilized barony has 60k general rulership XP, 15k cleric tithes XP for whoever the spiritual leader is (works out about right, 500 families * 1gp/mo * 30 months), some amount of thief XP based on market class...  and then wizards are hard.  The thing I like about this is that when you move to personal domains, you can fill those slots with henchmen (if your hench repertoire is diverse), and level them up for rulership when you need vassals.  I'm not sure it's worth the complexity.

So then the primary benefits of domain rulership are XP and a captive market, and the focus in the domain game is on taking them from other people.  If you need cash from your domain, you can exploit it, which is sort of like self-pillaging and permanently reduces the XP value of the domain by an amount equal to the gold pieces extracted (and 1 peasant family per 120gp, not that we're modeling that here).  This seems like the right place to plug in a domain morale system that matches my assumptions, that for the most part your average peasant is never going to be terribly fond of his adventurer overlords and is mostly ambivalent until you start squeezing him.  So exploiting your domain (and other catastrophes and exceptional circumstances, like failure to address an invasion or donning a helm of alignment change) triggers a morale roll with immediate consequences like bandits or revolt, and otherwise domain morale is assumed to be apathetic.

I haven't looked at syndicates yet, but I think they'd be amenable to the same treatment, and if I abstract syndicates, then I can enforce the assumption that they're not made up exclusively of 4th-level spies, and then the math will be much saner (and if you use a syndicate to push beyond its normal limits, then you get into exploitation and popular morale).  Cleric domains should be fine.  I suppose I should turn my attention to magic research next, and figuring out how that would work in a system with loose timekeeping.  The other next thing to do would be to redo the Simple Domains entries with lump sums of XP.

A/X: Halls: Refuges in Civilization

I already needed rules for building up refuges in the wilderness, and I was thinking about facilities for increasing spell point recovery rate in civilization, and now I'm thinking about base building where-ever.

Reasons to encourage and codify "base-building in civilization" in the mid-levels:

• My players generally buy a townhouse anyway and then complain about lack of base-building, so I think if there were reasons to build more stuff they would happily do so.
• Generalize to cover wilderness basebuilding / refuge-upgrading with the same rules, at a distance-and-danger cost multiplier.
• Base facilities could help ease the pain of small markets.
• Maintenance cost for your base would be a nice way to streamline / centralize cost of living expenses.
• A collective party possession encourages unity and the party as the unit of continuity.
• Provide absolute clarity on what it means to get the treasure "home" for XP purposes, especially in points-of-light settings where there isn't a big "civilization" zone just off the hex-map.

So here's how I see this going down in practice.

Find a town you like.  Go meet with the local lord and petition for the right of hearth and charter.  He's going to ask you to do him a favor.  It's going to be a messy, adventurous favor.  If you have powerful enemies in town (from, say, a night of drunken mayhem fighting temple eunuchs - purely hypothetically, of course), he's going to ask you for an additional favor per powerful enemy.  If you have a powerful ally in town, maybe he asks you for one less favor.

So you deal with his ankheg problem and come back, and swear a little oath to help defend the town from threats monstrous and domestic, and he authorizes your charter as a Legitimate Fraternal Order (like the Elks or the Masons - make sure to choose a name), granting you the right to build or purchase a hall within his domain.  You go find some crappy land on the outskirts of town and hire some laborers to clear it and build a longhouse.  Congratulations, you are no longer murderhobos (just murder-...citizens).  Everyone now knows where to find you - traveling merchants, barbarians for hire, messengers bearing quests, peasants looking for help with their wyvern problems, your wizard's roommate from college, your wizard's ex from college, knights errant looking for someone to fight, beggars, preachers, used magic item salesmen, performing acrobats seeking a venue, the thieves' guild seeking to acquire something while disguised as acrobats, the thieves' guild looking to move some hot goods, the watch looking for some hot goods, the tax collector, the assassin's guild, meddling archmages, elder dragons...  I think I feel a random table coming on.

It comes with enough space, kitchen, and larder enough to feed and sleep n people.  This is the maximum number of PCs, henchmen, hirelings, and retainers you can support in "clean, sanitary conditions" suitable for healing and the avoidance of loyalty penalties.  Upgrade for more capacity.  If you have excess capacity, townsfolk come drink and gamble with you and some of them might be recruitable as henchmen.  Some of them might also be spies for the other Rival Adventurous Orders with halls in town (or from the next town over).
Also comes with some capacity for horses and dogs; again, if you want more (or cavalry retinue), kennel and stable upgrades.

Other stuff to put in or around your hall (eventually compound):

• Library and laboratory for magic research.  Capture a spellbook from an NPC with new spells in it?  Goes in the party library, becomes guild secrets.
• Chapel, sanctum, meditorium, summoning chamber, etc for spell point recovery.
• Treasury / vault / reliquary.  Stop paying those bankers negative interest to store your gold, and store it yourself.
• Monster heads on the walls / trophy room.  Bonus to reaction rolls on your own turf.
• Maybe a more general "prestige / grandeur" mechanic?  Helps negate the hiring penalty for slander?
• Armory.  Keep your magic swords organized, and stockpile plate mail when it's available in your lousy market.
• Cemetery / catacombs.  Inter your dead henchmen properly to prevent them from rising as the undead for vengeance, and to keep high-level wizards from using their skulls as crafting components (keep the skulls for yourself).  Spend money on elaborate funerals for your PCs for more efficient reserve XP generation (per Heroic Fantasy Handbook).  Ghosts give you quests.
• Shrine to your dead fighter, Bob.  Subsequently play a cleric of Bob.  Bob becomes the Party Deity.  Praise be unto Bob.
• Smoke-filled back rooms in which to plan hijinks and dungeon-crawls, away from the prying ears of Rival Adventurous Orders and The Law.
• Pit where potential henchmen can fight each other so you can learn their stats.  Or for gambling.  Or both.
• Warehouse space to store your trade goods, both stolen and legitimate.
• Wagon yard for assembling your caravan(s), might be visited by traveling merchants or halflings if space available
• Garden
• Medicinal
• Poison
• Psychoactive - regain spell points in the field, but save vs datura
• Ornamental, +prestige
• Go on, plant that magic seed you found
• Infirmary with physician hirelings to cure your lycanthropy and succubus-herpes without it becoming public knowledge.  And more natural healing, I guess.
• Forge with smith hirelings to make more plate for your henchmans.  Or masterwork weapons, if those rules are in use.
• Still for Dwarven Brewing.
• Gem-cuttery for lapidary hirelings to improve found uncut gems (hat tip to Courtney's Downtime and Demesnes, the draft of which I should probably finish reading before attempting to roll my own thing here)
• Parade / training yard to upgrade your mercs.
• Siege workshop / testing range...  I feel like this might be pushing the edge of the Charter, though, and start generating Concern from your local lord.
• Dock / shipyard, if coastal or riverine.
• Menagerie of exotic beasts
• (Prestige again, but a small chance of escape...)
• Barn and pasture of not-so-exotic beasts for use in trapfinding, hecatombs, and rations-on-the-hoof
• Dungeon / prison for beastman prisoners and hostages
• Walls, towers, etc...  but again, local lord will push back on too much of this.

All of this has been done before, in for example the 3.x Stronghold Builder's Guide.  All this is aso easy enough to work out under ACKS' rules as they exist.  It's just in a very low-abstraction state at the moment, much like Domains at War.  You're hiring individual mercenaries and buying individual windows for your hall.  This is an easy enough problem to solve.

Bonus: use the same facilities rules for NPC organizations like wizards' cabals, temples, and thieves' guilds.  Membership in a guild at low levels provides access to libraries, laboratories, and restoration facilities in exchange for dues and labor during downtimes.  These organizations are chartered differently and don't compete with adventuring organizations, but have monopoly on sale of eg magic in town (nudging players towards adventuring rather than sitting in town selling spells).

A/X Mercenaries: Money Up Front

Been thinking more about open table ACKS lately.  Stumbled on this old post and read through some of the session reports from the Shieldlands campaign, that best of open-table ACKS games.

I think the session needs to be a relevant unit of time.
Markets refresh per session (roughly).
Spells refresh per session (roughly).
Domains provide passive income per session and no XP (and may be a source of trouble; clocks can run in them, and they're part of the world in the structure of "session begins, players attempt to do a thing, pizza break, a thing happens in the world")
More explicit structure for sessions - Market Phase, Planning Phase, Adventure!, Treasure Phase

Going to need to scale things down a little from ACKS' defaults.  I'm OK with a 9th level fighter having 30 mercenaries and a run-down fort - this is exactly what you'd expect from the Men, Brigands monster entry.  So if you're 9th level and you have a wee baby domain that nets you 250gp/session and a handful of mercs, that's OK by me.

I've still been kicking around how to simplify mercenary bookkeeping.  I think I may have hit a potential solution.

First, hire them as units beneath a sergeant, like I've been saying for a while.
Second, pay them up front.

ACKS has this concept of "the magic ratio", which comes up repeatedly in its economics and is tied to the rate of return on capital in fantasy Rome (bear with me).  Most investments are expected to pay for themselves in about 30 months, and characters in the world are assumed to have about 30 times their monthly income in assets.

So if you want to hire a mercenary and not have to deal with tracking his monthly expenses, pay him 30 months of wages up front.  Better, do it through a sergeant to handle a whole squad and if any one guy dies, the sergeant will take the pay pre-allocated to that guy and use it to pay some other poor bastard that he dragoons in the next market you pass through.

So if a light infantryman costs 6gp/mo in wages, then you can hire a squad of 6 of them for the foreseeable future for around 1100gp.  And then mercenaries become sort of like a magic item - they can go on your character sheet instead of in a spreadsheet, because you don't need to pay them monthly.  "The Yellow Saddles, Light Cavalry, 5/6 men".  Easy.  And they replenish between sessions subject to market class (possibly derandomized, because I don't want to have to roll for merc availability all the time).

And if you want them to replenish faster, we could base something on the commissioning items rules to let you raise the effective market class, and then either give fighters free virtual gold to spend on this every session (or let them write recruiting costs off on their living expenses), or give them a venturer-like ability to replenish mercenary units as if the market were one size larger.  This also provides an incentive to visit markets during adventures, to heal your mercenary units.

Now, I could see some sticker shock at 1100gp for six measly light infantrymen.  It's 2200 for heavy infantry, 2700 for bowmen, 5400 for light cavalry, and 10800 for heavy cavalry.  Those are not small chunks of change, and my former players would probably want to be banking that money towards building a fortress.  But if you change how domain acquisition works, from "build a fortress" to "domains are immutable, go capture one", then these changes complement each other - the money you aren't spending on castles can be spent on mercs, and the mercs are how you "buy" a castle.  And honestly, with domains out of the spending picture - would you rather have a +1 spear, or six knights who respawn between sessions?

Ooh, and this works out beautifully - a 9th level fighter has 250,000 XP.  He got about 200,000 of that from GP.  200,000 GP in permanent mercenaries is about 180 knights, which would be big for a bandit encampment but is in the realm of the reasonable (he probably spent some money on other things too).

So I don't think this is a totally crazy plan.